I have a new rating system I should explain. It has mostly arisen because I’ve felt the need to have more playing field when it comes to good ratings while I don’t need that many variations of “bad” for songs I don’t like. This leads to the ratings being lower than usual and, more importantly, more clumped together at about three stars. I tried to compensate for this by revealing the true average values instead of rounding to the nearest half-star as I used to do. Maybe next year I’ll find a representation that exposes more granularity without sacrificing presentation.

Songs without any music are excluded from the average.The top and bottom 10% of songs are excluded from the average.20 (★): Unlistenable40 (★★): Average60 (★★★): Good80 (★★★★): Very good100 (★★★★★): Excellent

Well it's that time of year again and what a year in music 2014 was!!! I thought last year was a good year, but 2014 I think was better!! So much so that I have had to expand my top 5 to a top 10!!! So here it is...

I was waiting for this album ever since I fell in love with his 2012 release All the Little Lights, and although this one as a whole didn't quite live up to it, there are some great songs on this one. A few of the songs are a little too dark lyrically for me but the highlights here are numerous, including 27, Heart's On Fire, Start A Fire and my all time favourite Passenger song Whispers. Lyrically this song speaks to me like almost no other, so well written and really reflects where I'm at in my life at the moment and over the last couple of years.